Published: April 01, 2008 12:14 am            

Ms. Takes: Dealing with age — it’s all in how you look at it

I passed another anniversary of my birth late last month. You’d think I’d have enough sense to quit counting, but birthdays were always special when I was growing up and I’ve never been able to shed the notion that it is my special day.

Not that all birthdays are equal. The early ones seemed to come much further apart than one year, while those lately have seemed to come rolling around every time we push the clocks forward (or backward) an hour.

I keep telling myself that age is more a matter of attitude than of years. More and more I am beginning to feel something like Dorian Gray in reverse. The outside reflects all of those years of living while inside I still feel like 25. I no longer care to feel 17. I want to be old enough to vote.

Even as the decades passed I wasn’t especially bothered, but somehow when I got to the age of 40 I began to realize that those little twinges in the wrists were going to stick with me and, probably, grow more persistent. I think it was about then that my Best Friend came up with a way to mellow my outlook.

“You are really only four,” he said, adding, “but maybe I’m dyslectic.”

What vistas that opened! The next year I was 14 and the year after that only 24. When I reached age 44, I began to see some problems with his formula. When you age in increments of 10 years — rather than the customary one — it adds up in a hurry. So, by the time I was 45, things looked rather bleak and heaven preserve us when I got to 49!

Just think about living past 100 years and begin aging in increments of 100 rather than 10!

The advantage of the system is that the older I get, the more often the larger number is on the left and I get a few more years of pretended youth — at least in the “theory of dyslectics”. I could sit there all day and claim to be 36, but most people aren’t fooled one bit. You can even try to pass it off as a family theory, but that won’t wash either. You simply are what you’ve become in all those years of living.

So, rather than celebrating with wild abandon, I now prefer going out to lunch rather than dinner and a gift of something edible, or perishable, or something to be worn and worn out — preferably before the next 10-year increment — is the gift which wins my heart.

Liz Ciancone is a retired Tribune-Star reporter. Send e-mail to opinion@tribstar.com.

        

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